Wolves of Eden
Page 23
“I know who the goddamn colonel is. You don’t have to tell me.” The officer rubs his face, squinting in the harsh winter daylight. “Who does he want? Does he want to see me?”
Kohn remains impassive. “No, sir. It’s Molloy, 7th Cav, he wants to see.”
The officer wipes a dried paste of spittle from his mustache. “Well, there is a hobbled cav lieutenant asleep in front of the stove if that’s who you mean. I never did get his name.”
The officer turns away, leaving the door ajar for Kohn to follow. Inside the barracks two bunks hold sleeping men. The other four are empty, bedclothes in disarray. The air is cold and rank, the stove door gaping, cold ashes in its belly. There is something chaotic and unkempt about the barracks. Officers are under less scrutiny from their seniors than that in which they themselves hold their men but in Kohn’s experience, their quarters are generally well squared away. They have men to do it for them after all. Perhaps here at Phil K., things being stretched as they are, the men of the fort are needed for things other than cleaning the officers’ billets.
“Sir,” Kohn says. Molloy is snoring fitfully, wrapped in a buffalo coat on the floor in front of the stove, his breath visible in the stale, morning-after air. Kohn nudges his shoulder with his boot. “Sir, where are your crutches?”
The officer who answered the door swallows the remains of a glass of whiskey from a long table littered with bottles, mugs, empty peach cans and herring tins. Cigar stubs stud the floorboards. The officer winces and says, “He burned them, last night, when we ran short of firewood. Capital man, the lieutenant.” The officer smiles. There are dark circles under his eyes, a haunted look about him. Spooked, Kohn thinks. Like a dog beaten too many times. “Capital man.”
“Sir, you have to wake yourself, sir,” Kohn continues, knowing how long it will take. The day will be half over, he thinks, by the time he is able to attend to the investigation, whether or not Molloy will insist on attending to it with him. He thinks to leave him asleep and then worries that to do so will worsen Molloy’s pneumonia and he will not be responsible for the captain’s death from pleurisy, not after all they have been through together. He will preside over it but he will not be responsible. In his heart is a roil of disgust and sadness, regret for the weakness of man and his wretched, wicked wars and what they do to the good men who fight them. Men like Molloy. Like himself. Gott sol undz helfn. God help us.
He slings his officer over his shoulders, noting how light Molloy has become. There is less of the man now than once there was.
In the hospital barracks, Kohn is thankful the surgeon is detained with a patient, a logger with a crushed ankle. Another amputation, Kohn imagines, settling in for half an hour of Molloy vomiting up stringy gluts of yellow bile into a pail before he can run a bath for him.
TWO HOURS LATER Kohn returns to the hospital barracks and he does not care if the surgeon sees him or not.
Kohn stands over Molloy’s bed and watches him. The officer’s eyes are closed but they clench and flutter, in thrall to terrible memory in the form of nightmare. Standing there, Kohn wonders if Molloy is dreaming of a Tennessee river town; of how in victory those in Union blue are raging, famished and spoiled to loot, putting fire to what will burn. Papers and smoke spilling from the courthouse windows, flames licking at the redbrick and Molloy has told the remains of the cavalry company he commands that he will not tolerate the harassment of women. He has warned them that, Confederate women though they may be, they are still American women and he will shoot or hang any man who lays a finger on one. He can do nothing about the infantry or artillery troops roaming the town. There is a distillery and it was emptied before being set alight. Darkness will see some hell in the town but Molloy has his own bottle in his haversack and has drunk some from it. The fierce thirst of a five-day siege. The air stinking of rot and char. Bodies bloating in the sun. Molloy and his men ride a sweep for holdout rebels; for raiders or snipers or the just plain suicidal.
The house is set back from the road out of town and appears untouched. Out of range of the shells that rained on the riverfront. Abandoned? No. There are cows in a side field, a horse harnessed to a buggy and tied off to a porch rail. No wind, tall oaks and a willow hang heavy about the property in high summer green. The house is too quiet to be abandoned. Molloy and Kohn, both, have seen it before often enough. The owners are inside, maybe in the root cellar or the hayloft but they are there, praying they will remain undiscovered, as if such a thing were possible. More fearful of losing their stock and possessions than careful with their lives. Poor fools. Molloy is not without pity for them. He would, he imagines, be the same if the situation were reversed. No matter. The cows will be beefsteaks quick as dickens and the horse requisitioned along with the buggy. Molloy will take one of the cows for his men and the horse and buggy to trade for supplies or to hand over to the medicals, though it is a fine buggy and will more likely end up the personal possession of a higher-ranking officer than himself before the medicals ever get it. Such is the way of war but this is not why they have approached the house. The grass is beaten down in the cow pasture, signalling that rebel troops have likely passed through here in their retreat from the town, entering the forest behind the field.
Molloy and Kohn and two other riders thunder down the path to the front of the house, the rumbling hoofbeat oft-times enough to convince those in a house that surrender is the best option available to them. They pull up outside, horses excited, snorting, pleased with the gallop and the distant smell of powder, the random popping of musket fire from town like corn in a hot covered pot. War horses. Molloy’s mare rears her head and peers with disdain upon the horse harnessed to the buggy.
In his dream Molloy hails the owners of the house. “Come on out. The town has fallen. You will not be harmed if you—”
The front door to the house opens.
Molloy sees it is a boy but the Remington is in his hand already—has hardly left it for the past God knows how many days—and he fires without thinking while at the same time his mind screams at him that it is a boy there on the porch. A tow-haired boy with a rifle twice as tall as he is, a danger to slow, low-flying birds with that musket and a danger to nothing much else, but Molloy has fired and a bolt is blown out of the boy’s skull the size of the boy’s own little fist. Molloy hears the mother keening in his sleep. The boy left the man of the house with his father’s musket, protecting his mother from the great rape of the South by Grant’s Army of the Tennessee. The mother ever keening in his sleep.
Molloy bolts upright and Kohn reaches out and touches his shoulder. “Sir? You were dreaming, sir. Are you all right?”
Molloy rubs angrily at his face, the hospital barracks coming into focus. He shrugs off Kohn’s hand. “I will be fine, Kohn, for the love of God. Just give me the goddamned, poxing bottle, you simpering hen, you fucking nursemaid.”
Tears well in Kohn’s eyes as he mixes the whiskey he has bought from a contract sawyer into a cup of fresh milk. He swallows rage and hands the draught to the captain.
Molloy drinks, drinks again and closes his eyes. He burps and holds a hand to his stomach and Kohn holds out a filthy pail but after a moment the captain opens his eyes and smiles and the smile is as abject as anything that Kohn has ever seen.
“The very milk of human joy, Kohn.”
“I don’t think it’s the milk, sir.”
Molloy takes another draft and waits for it to settle within him. Then he says, “Now, Daniel. This picture maker . . .”
Kohn looks at him. “I’ll have to pay one of the surgeon’s dogs for new crutches, sir—”
“Well bloody do it, Kohn, for the love of Christ on His cross. The day is half-wasted already with your fiddling.”
Kohn smiles because if he does not he might knock the captain off his bed and smash the hospital barracks to pieces with his fists.
31
OUR FRIEND RIDGEWAY GLOVER & A PICTURE IN A MEADOW
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p; AS I DID WRITE BEFORE I THINK I BEGAN THIS TESTAMENT for to tell the truth of events Sir because you are owed the truth. I once had the idea to keep a record of the events in my life but I never did do it & so this is my chance my very last chance perhaps. But as I write I find I do it now for another reason & that reason is the Picture Maker Ridgeway Glover & what happened to him. I feel that it is guilt over this that drives my pen along the pages the ink thick & slow with the cold my eyes stung with squinting in the dim lamplight. The oil for the lamp is corrupted like everything else the Army would have its men use.
As I told you we first met that lovely boy called Ridgeway on the march after we left the Laramie Peace Talks & he became our friend & as such it did be our duty to protect & guide him & before everything went sour for us we did this I swear to you as God Is My Witness we did.
But since we came upon that poor dear Ridgeway’s butchered body in the long grass & your terrible Jew brought me to this Guardhouse more than 1 of the boys detailed as guards did ask me (because they too were fond of Ridgeway like all who knew him) Why did he leave the safe harbour of the Ft. on his lonesome? & in the silence of this cell I asked myself the same question 100 times & can halt on only 1 single answer. That poor Quaker boy was troubled over what he was witness to. His heart was blackened by it & then Tom had his words with him & then you Sir went to him & pressed him & not long after that he was seen packing his mules for the road. Oh I do not blame you Sir but I do blame Tom. I told Tom to leave Ridgeway out of it all that he had nothing to do with what happened but Tom said that he did. Tom said that he was there & that did make him a part of it. You will be wondering a part of what?
I do tell myself betimes perhaps our friend would of left the Ft. without escort anyway. He often did in the early days for to spite the danger well known to all in the Ft. well Ridgeway did not fear the world the way yourself & myself might. He did not look out into the forest & see the dark parts of it or the shadows but saw instead the fair side of things the way the heavens carve up the spaces tween the branches with their light or the way dew does sparkle in the morning grass in a sunlit meadow. He would see the world like this & he would want to make one of his pictures of it.
Many is the time we tried telling him that behind all the fine & pretty spots where he might like to make his photographs well the Powder River country is a place of rough peril & that in a sunny meadow may stalk Sioux Braves who would like nothing more than to claim a fair haired scalp such as his. But he would only smile & tell us that if a man did not think ill of others then he could only hope that others would not think ill of himself & that as a Quaker he would not raise a hand agin another man. This he did believe would keep another man from raising a hand agin himself more fool that Quaker boy May God Keep Him. Over time we became accustomed to him being here 1 minute & gone from us the next for to make his pictures of some natural wonder or Indian squaw.
So it oft happened that my brother or myself or even little Addy Metzger (a long time veteran Bill like ourselves a Dutchy bugler who does be a boon companion & liked by boys of all nations in C Company) well him or we would up & say nearly once or twice a week, “Ho boys where did Ridgeway get to now?” And we would set about to find him.
I do recall a time late in August when he did accompany a troop of us sent as the Paymaster’s guard to Ft. Smith. Well we made camp the 1st night aside the upper Powder River in a clearing where there was the black remains of old camp fires Indian or trapper or Army or what we did not know but never mind it was a grand place for a bivouack & as pretty as one of Ridgeway’s pictures. We caught 7 trout between us in the clear running river for to eat with our beans & pilot bread. That meal by the fire is a fine memory I will always keep with me. It was a happy time & there are not many I can recall since we came here.
Once we felt that this Valley was as close to Eden as any on Earth with its rivers & grass & mountains & clean air & plenteous game. Even now in the dead of winter you can see why the Indians fight us for to keep it. Of course if you stop long enough to wonder on it you may question the sense of losing your hair or your balls God Bless Them to a Sioux skinning knife for the taking of another fellow’s country. You might wonder is it right at all to be barging in & taking it. But there is little enough time for a soldier to wonder on things & the Army does not encourage it. The Indians do nothing with this land anyway neither grazing nor farming on it so I reckon they have no right to keep it but there is them that would argue the toss over this.
But none of this did I think the next morning on that Paymaster’s escort up to Ft. Smith when Tom & I woke after a good sleep to find the Quaker boy missing from his bedroll by the fire pit the embers burnt down to ashes & the morning air cool enough to see your breath with all around us but for the sentries on picket fast asleep still.
“Where’s Ridgeway got to then?” says I to Tom.
“See is his picture making things—” Tom did not know yet the word for camera & not in the Gaelic anyway. Says he, “See if the yokes are where he left them.”
“They are not,” says I.
Tom heft himself up from his blankets. He is not a Hail The Sweet New Day sort of fellow at all in the mornings. Says he, “For all that is holy that boy is like a G__ D___ tinker travelling here & there with no cares in the world for anything but where the road does take him.”
Rubbing sleep from my eyes I took myself over to one of the sentries a Swede with no English at all on him. “Did you see the picture maker Henrik?” I made with my hands the shapes of long hair & a box. “Ridgeway,” says I. The Swede did catch on at last & point me to a deer trail that led away from the clearing into the woods. I suppose I wondered why he did not stop Ridgeway from leaving the bivouack as was our orders but in truth there is always trouble tween civilians & the Army for oft times no man knows who is in charge of another so mostly a soldier will say nothing for fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong man.
So Tom & myself took up our rifles & made to follow the deer trail into the woods & I tell you in no time at all we could not hear the running of the river & night shadows still hung heavy in the trees. We kept silence between us as we walked not daring to speak or call out to the picture maker for there is something of the woods that puts fear on a man no matter his age or experience of them.
Well Thanks Be To God but shortly the trees begun to thin & the morning sun strained to shine through the branches & soon we could see another clearing. We came to it after a moment & leaving the forest & our fears behind us in the wooded shadows we found ourselves in a meadow of fine long grass & wild flowers. It was maybe 200 yds. across & it dipped down in the middle to rise up on the far side to another wood. A layer of mist was afloat in the chill air at our knees & sunlight lit the water in it making it like a swathe of shining silver cloth above the grass. And across that meadow where the ground begun to rise into the far stand of forest my eye caught a thing moving & the sound of something did break the morning meadow’s silence & this sound was the low growling of a beast. More than 1 beast my eyes could now see & I tapped Tom’s shoulder & pointed for him to look.
“Wolves,” I did whisper to Tom in English first then in Irish too I do not know why. “Mac tire.”
“And there is Ridgeway,” says Tom raising his Springfield & using it to point some yds. to the right of what we now saw to be the carcass of a great deer or elk I did not know the difference then. Well it was lain out there in the wet grass that carcass the ribs of it white & bloody red & poking up like the beams of a shipwreck on a beach & 1 wolf had that dead elk’s guts in his teeth like a looter at the ship’s cargo. 2 other of the beasts did be at the hind of the elk snouts stained red but one was not at all at the elk’s body but instead in the long grass on his belly like a snake with his hackles up & his teeth unsheathed at the figure of our friend Ridgeway whose head & shoulders were under the camera’s drape with only his hand out of it for to open the lid of the camera’s eye or aperture I did later learn to call it.
Well I cast a wave of my arm to show him he was safe & that it was only us boys come to save him & he looked to me as if he could not reckon who we were at all. We trotted then over with the grass wetting our kerseys. I went to Ridgeway & Tom went to his wolf & it was only now did the Quaker boy put 2+2 together to make 4.
“Oh I never saw that one,” says he. “Did Tom shoot it Michael did he?”
“He did. That wolf would of liked you for his breakfast. You know you only need ask & Tom or myself will escort you on your picture making. You should not be off on your lonesome here in the woods & meadows boy. Sure it is not only wolves about this place & we would hate for you to lose them fair pretty locks of yours.”
Ridgeway gave me a smile like he always did. Says he, “I have no fight with the Indians Michael & I do expect they will take little notice of me armed only with a camera apparatus. Wolves however may not understand my intentions or the lack of sustenance I would prove to be in any meal. So I thank you gentlemen but I just had to try for that picture. The elk & the morning light & the mist. The wolves. Do you see what I am saying? Of course they would not keep still for the exposure but—”